Instapaper

Update: For the time being I am Pocket convert, because it’s free and no monthly subscription required for search. You can read more about Instapaper vs Pocket.

Did you caught yourself reading too much unnecessary articles online. Running trough meaningless pages and pages of non productive content? This can really be huge productivity killer, especially if you spend countless hours idly surfing the web for unimportant information. Also this kind of behavior led me to numerous articles being lost and never found again, because I simply forgot where I’ve read them… I was looking for an adequate solution for quite a long time, now I’ve found it.

So one day I stumbled upon Instapaper.com and this website alone helped me out with organizing tons of information that I am reading online. I got hooked up on it, even though I had strong alternatives, like Evernote! So how Instapaper works? There are a couple of ways to Instapaper, since I am covering mostly Google tools on this blog, will keep you covered with ways to easily add articles in Chrome. If you are not Chrome user, maybe you should check Mozilla addon or simply use the bookmarklet. If you click on the bookmarklet, it will automatically send your current article to your Instapaper account.

Some of the tips that I would include for Instapaper would be: use folders, send articles straight from your Google reader, use Archive and import/export RSS feeds.

Now back to Chrome, there is awesome extension, that helps you out sorting your articles better without using the bookmarklet. You can download it here. There are a couple of things that InstaChrome is doing better than a standard bookmarklet. It has next options stacked up in one place:

1. Let’s you send article to “Read Later” section

2. Convert the site to “Text mode” straight away, so it removes the design of website and lousy commercials and Adsense that’s overpopulating the internet these days and gives you clean slate environment for your reading, without visual distractions.

3. “Unread items” option allows you to send an article immediately to as it says, unread items, same goes for “Starred items” and “Archived items”, that you keep for later reference.

4. And options which allow you to turn on some additional options and change/edit your account on Instapaper.

From my perspective this extension lacks the option to send articles directly to the folders of your preference, but I usually send all the articles to “read later”, where I am doing actual reading on my android phone using InstaFetch, which I will cover in some of my next articles.

Now the second awesome thing is ChromePaper, which allows you offline reading of your articles, which is neat feature if you want your articles available even if you loose your internet connection. Great for laptops without active data connection. This web app, is still under development so we can expect some new neat features from it in the future.